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Chapter 17:
patriots
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

When I went to White Sands Missile Range there was a war on.
American troops were moving into Saudi Arabia to stop Iraqi forces
from taking that, too, Iraqis having taken Kuwait already. If they
took Saudi Arabia, they'd be sitting on half the oil resources of the
planet, which was not a good idea.

This war was very much on people's minds. One felt that anything
could happen; there was a sense that the world could suddenly change
in unpredictable ways. Things that were the same seemed out of
place.

At the
same time that Nayirah was telling Americans about Iraqi
atrocities, the Pentagon began telling Americans about the
looming Iraqi military threat. By mid-September, even before
Nayirah's testimony, the Bush administration claimed that
250,000 Iraqi troops were in Kuwait and the surrounding region.
But there was compelling evidence that the Iraqi military threat
to the Saudis had either been vastly overstated by the United
States or that Iraq had withdrawn its troops. In August, a
Japanese newspaper approached Peter Zimmerman, a fellow with the
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, with photos of Kuwait
taken by a Soviet commercial satellite company. Zimmerman showed
the photos to various other experts and "all of us agreed we
couldn't see anything in the way of military activity."

The media,
however, was too cautious to run with a story saying that the
Pentagon had exaggerated the Iraqi military threat.
Nevertheless, ABC News pursued the story and bought a set of
five Soviet satellite pictures of eastern Kuwait and southern
Iraq, which were taken on September 13, at a time during which
the United States asserted that the Iraqi military force was at
full strength. According to Zimmerman, the photos were
"astounding in their quality." But when he reviewed them with
another expert, both of them were shocked not by what they saw,
but by what they didn't see. "We turned to each other and
we both said, 'There's nothing there,' " said Zimmerman. Nothing
suggested an Iraqi military presence anywhere in Kuwait. "In
fact," Newsweek reported, "all they could see, in crystal-clear
detail, was the U.S. buildup in Saudi Arabia." Where were
the Iraqi soldiers? The evidence strongly suggested that
Cheney's presentation to Prince Bandar six weeks earlier vastly
overstated the Iraqi threat -- or that the Iraqis had retreated.

ABC News,
however, had neglected to obtain a photo showing one
thirty-kilometer strip of land in Kuwait. Perhaps all the Iraqi
troops were hiding in that sector. But an enterprising reporter
in Florida named Jean Heller got her newspaper, the St.
Petersburg Times, to purchase the missing photo. It too showed
no sign of the missing Iraqi troops. "The Pentagon kept saying
the bad guys were there, but we don't see anything to indicate
an Iraqi force in Kuwait of even twenty percent the size the
administration claimed," Zimmerman told Heller.

As the
story spread, the Pentagon's PR machine shifted into
damage-control mode. A spokesman said the military "sticks by
its numbers," then went to work discouraging ABC, CBS, and the
Chicago Tribune from pursuing the story. ABC News's Mark Brender explained
that the network dropped it partly because the photos
were inconclusive, but also because there was "a sense that you
would be bucking the trend. ... If you're going to stick your
neck out and say that the number of Iraqi forces may not be as
high as the administration is saying, then you better be able to
say how many there are." One of the few major newspapers to
suggest that Iraq never really showed up for battle en masse was
Newsday, which, after the Gulf War was under way, reported that
American troops had encountered a "phantom enemy." It noted that
most of the huge Iraqi army, which was said to have half a
million troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq, simply was nowhere
to be seen. In addition, as if foreshadowing the Iraq War of
2003, Saddam Hussein's supposed chemical warfare never
materialized.

One senior
American commander told a Newsday reporter that the information
about the Iraqi defenses put out before the war was highly
exaggerated. "There was a great disinformation campaign
surrounding this war," he said.

Out in the desert, everything was the same. I was driving through
New Mexico mountains taking note of cliff rose and Torrey ephedra,
my botanical obsessions somehow unaffected by the fact that millions
of Arabs and Israelis were in the line of fire and that hundreds of
thousands of young Americans and Europeans had put themselves in
that line, too. Chihuahuan desert mountains, I thought. Higher,
colder. Still mesquite, I thought, cholla, saltbush.

I had my son, Coulter, in tow for a week; it was school vacation
and he'd flown out to Phoenix to meet me. There had been comics
in his backpack, an airport full of folks in shades and shorts, a motel
in Las Cruces for the night, McDonald's for breakfast. These things
were the same. But I had discovered that I did not trust them.

Maybe this is the meaning of war: that what can be trusted in
peacetime -- food, warmth, professional pursuit, the people one
loves, one's own life -- may be taken away. And one is powerless
to stop it.

It was an interesting time to come to a missile range. I had not
planned it this way. The appointment had been made many months
before. And there we were.

We went through the gates at nine A.M. after signing in, thinking
how much the guards were like National Park rangers, thinking that
the missile range base looked like any desert town, only bigger and
duller and with more wires, awed by the ranked museum of white
missiles ranged on the roadside in "typical firing attitudes" aimed at
a space in the air over the Tularosa basin. Some were aimed a little
toward the San Andres Mountains.

We'd just come through the San Augustin Pass on down into the
Tularosa itself. The Tularosa is a tube of a valley most of which is
missile range. The range is two million acres strong, forty miles wide
and one hundred miles long; larger than Delaware and Rhode Island
combined. It contains White Sands National Monument, and the
monument is closed down whenever it's in the line of experimental
fire, which is not often. The basin is bounded on the eastern side by
the Sacramento Mountains; "this was chosen because it was enclosed,"
we learned soon.

White Sands Space Harbor lies in the missile range, too, just north
of the National Monument. NASA space shuttle pilots train there on
a modified Grumman Gulfstream II jet, and the runways of packed
gypsum are kept within three hours of readiness all the time in case
a real shuttle needs to land there. Columbia did land here once, in
1982, when Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert of California
(like White Sands, Edwards is on a dry lake bed; dry lake beds
being the most absolutely level places on the surface of the earth)
was temporarily flooded -- a hazard of desert lake beds anywhere.

White Sands Missile Range came into being on July 9, 1945, and
was called White Sands Proving Ground at the time. It was needed
badly and right away, there being a war on, and some of the ranchers
that lived here were hustled off with less than two weeks' notice, the
Army Corps of Engineers seizing the place by right of eminent domain.
This desert being what it is, with about ten inches of rainfall
in the average year, things do not rot fast -- though they may rust and
blow away or be buried in white gypsum sand -- but a lot of
those ranchers' homesteads are still here. Cans are still on shelves,
washbasins in the corners, bedsprings on the floors. All the minutiae
of peace. Horses got left behind in the rush, too, and they have gone
about their business ever since, undisturbed by rocketry or the Army
Corps. There are about twelve hundred feral horses on the range
right now, there are clearly too many of them here, and no one
knows what to do about it. They overgraze the place and take food
from the mouths of desert bighorns and pronghorns, and this upsets
environmentalists and people at Game and Fish, but there are animal
rights activists who do not like the round 'em up for dogmeat option;
so the public affairs officer has to deal with the thorny politics of
horses, among other things.

***

Outside the Public Affairs Building, next to the sidewalk, is a roundish
object with boxy rocketlike flanges at one end. It's about the size of
an old VW bug and is painted yellow. A sign next to it says that this is
a spare casing for Fat Man. Fat Man was the first atomic bomb that ever
exploded anywhere; it went off on July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site in the
northern reaches of the White Sands Proving Ground, one week to the day
after the Proving Ground had been established; the reason, no doubt, for
the rush. Later, another Fat Man exploded over
Nagasaki. The spare casing is a little rusty, and you can put your
hand on it.

The Public Affairs Building is something like a school; the ceilings
are low and the desks are old and are busy and crowded, the linoleum
is worn. Every office has a wide-screen TV -- this part is not like a
school -- and every TV is tuned to the same news station that features
a twenty-four-hour-a-day newscast on the war in the Middle East.
During the hours that I spent in that building conducting interviews,
our eyes kept wandering to the screen: tanks, aircraft carriers,
airplanes,
trucks filled with soldiers in camouflage -- partly desert and
partly forest camouflage; they'd been in a rush, too -- and fuzzy
views of Scud missile damage in Tel Aviv, and clips of the President
talking in front of a blue curtain with the Presidential seal.

Twice there was a clip showing a missile riding a comet of white
fire toward the top center of the TV screen. The video camera had
followed the missile in an uneven way, in jumps and stops, so the
missile didn't seem to move much but got smaller and smaller until
it became a ball of white fire.

When this news clip came on, the Public Affairs Building went
quiet. You could hear cars going by outside. You could hear the rurk
of a raven over the Tularosa basin. You could hear the announcer
saying how the Patriot surface-to-air guided missile system "designed
to acquire, track and engage multiple high-speed aircraft at
medium and high altitudes" had been successful in intercepting all,
or almost all, of the Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at Tel Aviv. The
Patriot was saving lives. By spiking a big gun. By blowing up enemy
incoming in midair.

The Patriot was tested and retested here. Originally conceived as
a defense against enemy aircraft, it now worked fine against missiles,
too.

The Patriot had taken twenty-two years to develop and perfect.
Whenever the news clip came on, people looked at their hands, at
their desktops, into space, more than they looked at the screen. They
didn't need to look at the screen. They looked like they were listening
to their own child delivering the valedictorian address for the
graduating
class of White Sands Missile Range.

***

This is a humongous outdoor laboratory, a white-coats kind of place.
It is used as a test facility by the Army, Navy, Air Force, and by
NASA, as well as by independent defense contractors. When a missile
is developed it can be sent here to see what it can do, and what can
be done to it. Under carefully monitored conditions the "product"
is soaked in salt water to mimic oceans and rolled in mud to mimic
battlefields, it is roasted, frozen, irradiated, shaken, bent, rolled,
chipped, and generally tormented. This is a kind of boot camp for
materiel, in other words, after which the test results -- the report
card -- are sent home to the engineers and scientists who mastermind
design. Often this means that the product goes back to the drawing
board, for a while.

Then it comes back. After it's passed all these and other in-house
tests, if it is a missile, it is fired.

***

Dr. Robert H. Goddard is generally considered to be the father of
American rocketry. He patented the first liquid-fueled rockets in
1914; during World War I he worked on making rockets into weapons;
in 1919 he wrote a paper concluding that rockets could be built
that might reach the escape velocity of the earth, launch us into orbit,
in other words, but this bit of whimsy was scoffed at or ignored.
During World War II the Germans were the only ones who took his
ideas seriously, and they turned them into weapons, including the
infamously famous V-2 that almost cost the Allies the war.

In August of 1945, three hundred freight cars filled with captured
V-2 components arrived in New Mexico, along with one hundred
captured German missile experts and scientists. On April 16, 1946,
the first,V-2 was fired on White Sands Proving Ground, from Launch
Complex 33 (this is now a National Historic Landmark, as is Trinity
Site), and it flew to eighteen thousand feet.

***

Goddard had launched his early inventions from his meadow, back
at his home in New England, and after a while these went pretty far,
and the local Massachusetts fire marshal told him to stop -- his
gizmos were a hazard to his neighbors' corn. So Goddard moved to
Roswell, New Mexico.

There was not much here that his rockets could be hazard to, and
no one to mind much if they were. This missile range was established
less than a hundred miles west of Roswell with that same reasoning,
and -- if rockets have to be fired anywhere -- it turns out not to be
bad reasoning.

I've heard this from five separate biologists (I didn't believe it at
first, but I do now, having heard it since from three more): if you
need to look at pristine desert, go to a military reserve. There are
plenty out here: there's White Sands, and there's Fort Bliss (New
Mexico and Texas) and Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range and
Yuma Proving Ground (Arizona); and Nellis Air Force Range (Nevada) and
China Lake Naval Weapons Center, Edwards Air Force Base, Fort Irwin
Military Reservation, Chocolate Mountains Gunnery Range, and Twenty-nine
Palms Marine Corps Base (all in southern California). Not only do these
outweigh, many tens of times, the size of the National Park system; the
important thing is that the public is not allowed on them. And it turns out that the public
with their cars and dirt bikes and pistols and penchants for picking
things up -- is more of a damaging force to native desert than any
amount of exploding ordnance.

In addition to his superb grounding
of the work in the literature of organizational change, Durant provides
extensive detail on the substance of the military’s environmental
crisis. The military controls a great deal of land and they have
contaminated enormous amounts of it. Both the military and the reader
come to be amazed by the growing size of the military’s toxic waste
problem.

In 1985, for example, the DoD
estimated cleanup costs at $5 to $10 billion for a universe of 400 to
800 contaminated sites. Yet by 1988 the DoD had reported 12,000
potential sites, with estimated cleanup costs totaling $8.5 to $12.8
billion over the next five to seven years alone. Then, less than a year
later, DoD revised its estimates (in 1987 dollars) upward to between $11
and $15 billion, including $2 billion for the army’s Rocky Mountain
Arsenal in Colorado. But even these figures had to be revised
drastically by the end of 1989. The number of sites identified increased
by 24 percent, to 15,257, and cleanup costs soared as high as $42.2
billion. Moreover, the Pentagon still lacked even reasonable
‘guestimates’ about the severity of contamination at its nearly 7,000
formerly used defense sites scattered in the United States and abroad.
(78)

Durant’s analysis of the political
battle between opponents and proponents of environmental protection is
as insightful as his brilliant organizational analysis. He observes
that:

The military and its allies were
also not shy about using delegitimation, deinstitutionalization, and
disinformation strategies as these crises of authority played out.
Respectively, these tactics involved undermining the authority of
opponents or their actions, undermining the capacity of regulators to
act aggressively, and providing false information. Indicative of
delegitimation strategies, for example . . . [was] the use of
committee-shopping strategies. Illustrative were the military’s repeated
efforts to avoid ENR [environment and natural resource] committees and
the White House by working through allies on House and Senate Armed
Services committees. (126)

Although the military continued its
efforts to resist environmental clean up, or more charitably to balance
its’ environmental responsibilities with its national security mission,
the nation was institutionalizing environmental protection throughout
the 1980s and 1990s. State and local environmental agencies were rapidly
growing during this period. NIMBY (not in my backyard) was becoming a
major force in local politics as communities became more assertive in
protecting their environmental resources and ensuring that if
environmental damage must take place it would not impact their homes or
localities. As Durant relates:

These post-Cold War
civil-military concerns, of course, were hardly novel. Issues like these
have arisen ever since the first V-2 rocket tests in 1946 at White Sands
Missile Range in New Mexico. Indeed, neighbors of military bases have
experienced it all: the window-shattering noise of low-flying F-16s,
F-111 Stealth fighters, and B-52 bombers; the destruction of errant
Patriot missiles; and the wafting of pollution into their respiratory
systems from open burning/open detonation of munitions. Yet during the
Cold War, most neighbors either suffered silently or vacated or leased
their properties in the name of national security when asked to do so by
the services. What was different in the post-Cold War era was that
the ‘neighbors’ were now closer, more numerous, less deferential, and
more prone to use a bevy of ENR [environment and natural resource] laws
to help pursue their grievances (real or imagined). (155–156)

There are flourishing herds of pronghorns here, as well as the
horses, and in the mountains there are bighorn sheep and mule deer,
and the lowlands are home to a growing number of gemsbok that
were imported by the New Mexico Game and Fish (for some outlandish
reason) from the Kalahari. There are mountain lions, bobcats,
coyotes, kit foxes, and the usual desert array of golden eagles and
quail and owls and other birds (barn owls have made a nest on the
deserted gantry of Launch Complex 33), and plenty of small mammals,
bats, snakes, lizards, insects, desert pupfish in the saline
springs. More than three hundred species of animals have been documented
here. A team of wildlife biologists is part of the base staff of
White Sands Missile Range. Part of their job is to route and schedule
missile firings to fit the breeding and feeding schedules of wildlife,
to see that least damage is done.

The Public Affairs' (somewhat repetitive) cant that this range is
a "National Treasure" is not entirely blarney. Eight independent
biologists can't all be wrong.

The strange, contained, pristine value of this landscape goes beyond
the natural history. It works for human history, too.

Bob Burton is an archaeologist, and has been on the White Sands
Missile Range staff for four years now.

"Protection of archaeological sites is policy," he says. "It's expedient
for them to find an area for the launch site, impact points, camera
pads that won't have a negative effect on the archaeological sites.
This place is a national treasure, archaeologically speaking. We have
sites on this range that are may be unique in the United States. The
pot hunters haven't been here. No one's made off with the goods."
He's a large, comfortable man, and he's as excited as he should be
by having the run of the place. As he ticks off the waves of peoples
and cultures who have lived here, I'm struck, as I was in the Goddard
story, by how thin and recent this history is.

Between twelve and thirteen thousand years ago the first bands of
nomadic hunters came in here, and this paleo-Indian era lasted until
nine thousand years ago, at least. There were lakes in the basin then,
freshwater lakes surrounded by trees. These nomads, known as
Clovis people, hunted big game. There are mammoths' footprints
fossilized in the now dry bed of Lake Otero: it is no trick to see what
they hunted for.

Since their heyday the whole Southwest has been drying out and
warming up, and within a few millennia of the hunters' arrival the
big game was gone. People turned to other things. Some learned to
farm. Those who lived here next built settlements and planted corn.
By A.D. 1100 there were villages here made of hundreds of adobe
rooms, some stacked three stories tall. The villages were built near
permanent springs and the people planted their corn on the now dry
lake beds where the water table lay close. In those days, there were
more people living in this valley than live here now, including the
more than eleven thousand people who work or live at the main post
of the missile range.

Between 1275 and 1400 the drying and warming of the desert had
gone so far that farming ceased, almost overnight; the Anasazi and
Hohokam disappeared, as they disappeared elsewhere, the people
moving en masse to the valley of the Rio Grande.

Then, around 1500, Apaches came in. Nomads again: "they lived
lightly on the earth," Bob says, and it's easy to see that he likes
this,
that lightly is the way he believes this piece of earth is meant to be
lived on; the only way to live on it, now that it is desert.

He's working on a site right now where a battle was fought, in
1880, between Apaches and the U.S. Cavalry. He's found the Apache
emplacements, the stone fortifications built to shoot from and hide
behind. He knows where the cavalry holed up; he's found the scattered
cartridges. There was a war on here then, and the cavalry were
surprised, outmaneuvered, and surrounded. They lost nine men, and
most of the fifty were wounded. It was a lot like Custer's fight, Bob
says, except that the U.S. troops were rescued by another troop of
cavalry at the eleventh hour; after a token charge or two, the troops
took their wounded and left.

"It was a battle where both sides won. The cavalry drove off the
Apaches. The Apaches got the Army off their tail."

There's a silence after this; only the big-screen TV keeps up its
exotic blather. All three of us -- my son and I and Bob -- sit bent
forward with our elbows on our knees, as if we were gathered 'round
a fire, TV light from the Middle East flickering on our faces, our
faces blank, watching another battle forming up.

Now the Tularosa valley is dominated -- when it is dominated
-- by high-energy laser systems running through their paces,
by smart missiles shooting through their gantries, riding cones of
white fire, from which boiling clouds of smoke roll up. The only
thing that is not the same is this: just over a century ago, bows and
arrows nearly had the upper hand.